The Weekly Standard reserves the right to use your email for internal use only. Occasionally,
we may send you special offers or communications from carefully selected advertisers we believe may be of benefit to our subscribers.
Click the box to be included in these third party offers. We respect your privacy and will never rent or sell your email.

Please include me in third party offers.

To listen, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

this podcast is available only to Premium Digital subscribers.

You have two options:

1:

Log-In Email: *

Password: *

Remember me

2:

If you are not yet a Subscriber to TWS, don't wait
any longer to Subscribe Now!

So when Spitzer says as comptroller he wants to “control corporate governance,” he’ll only be redoubling current efforts. Last year, Spitzer wrote a column for Slate titled “Flawed Dimon” criticizing Jamie Dimon’s dual role as CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase. The post’s first sentence likely reads ominously now for the big banker: “What to do with Jamie Dimon?” The city’s top pension fund, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, invests with JPMorgan, and earlier this year Liu led a failed shareholder proposal to oust Dimon from his position as chairman. What’s to stop Spitzer from pursuing the same goal? If his tenure as New York attorney general is any indication, he may get what he wants.

In his eight years as attorney general, Spitzer cultivated a reputation as a hardnosed corruption buster, targeting everyone from the mob to the financial services industry. Fawning journalists dubbed him the “Sheriff of Wall Street” for his crackdown on “corporate misconduct.” To reporters and the public, Spitzer portrayed himself as a pro-capitalist watchdog, someone who loved the system but had to save it from itself. To the Wall Street types he was pursuing, he was a tyrannical menace, prone to screaming threats at executives over the phone.

Spitzer’s strategy was to take advantage of a quirky, obscure New York state law called the Martin Act, which empowers the attorney general to pursue financial fraud cases almost unfettered. The law was developed during Prohibition to combat bootlegging, and Spitzer was the first attorney general in generations to use it to go after Wall Street firms.

It began in 2002, when investigators in Spitzer’s office uncovered a routine practice by brokerage Merrill Lynch whereby brokers in the research division of the firm touted to investors failing stock of companies that were clients of Merrill Lynch’s investment banking division. Spitzer announced the investigation’s findings to the public, calling it a “shocking betrayal of trust.” The revelation was a blow to Merrill Lynch’s image as the brokerage of choice for the middle-class investor. Spitzer quickly convinced the company to settle out of court and reform its policies. He did the same with nine other banks after further investigation revealed the research/investment banking collusion was standard industry practice. All of them settled and reformed.

In fact, few of Spitzer’s cases against corporations and executives went to court, which may have been by design. The Merrill Lynch episode set the template: File charges against a high-profile company, run a campaign against it, and wait for the settlement; soon, the remaining companies in that sector find it’s in their best interest to avoid Spitzer’s scrutiny, and they settle, too.

It didn’t matter that in the few suits that did proceed, like those against New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick Grasso and Hank Greenberg of AIG, most of the charges were eventually dropped. It didn’t matter that his responsibilities as New York’s top law enforcement officer began to blend with his political ambitions. Spitzer was Wall Street’s “top cop,” as the media put it. And besides, who’s going to side with the corporate fat cats? In 2006, the Sheriff rode the publicity all the way to the governor’s mansion.

Of course, what happened just over a year after he became governor is now the stuff of political legend. The prostitution revelations. The Mayflower Hotel. Client 9. The agonizing press conference with Silda Spitzer glaring at her husband.

So Spitzer’s return to public life looks rather pathetic, particularly since fallen politicians must do talk-show penance, and Spitzer is simply no good at it. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when asked about the scandal, he tried (and failed) to produce tears of contrition. On TheTonight Show, he bantered awkwardly with Leno until the comedian got to the prostitution scandal: “How can you be this stupid?”

The line got a big laugh and extended applause from Leno’s studio audience. Hands clasped, Spitzer looked downward and nodded his head, acknowledging his cue to repent for the thousandth time. That’s what it takes, after all, to rebuild a political brand.

Eliot Spitzer may be a creep. He may be a hypocrite. He may be one of the worst practitioners of mixing politics with public duty. But he’s definitely not stupid.